Category Archives: Pop culture

Getting over…

You know you’re getting over bronchitis when:

  • Naps, while still necessary, are no longer the absolute highlight of the day
  • You finally notice that there are unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink (though you still don’t do anything about them)
  • Instead of gulping them mindlessly, you start noticing the taste of the Amoxicillin pills
  • The Dungeons and Dragons wiki is no longer entertaining reading (last week, you thought it deserved the Booker)

In short, I’ve gotten well enough that boredom has set in. But not well enough to actually go out and do something about it.

How many…

Still knocked out by bronchitis, so here’s a dumb joke I heard at church today (thanks, Ken) in lieu of a real post:

Q: How many banjo players does it take to cook a possum?

A: Four. One to cook the possum, and three to direct traffic around him.

Stupid joke

Having bronchitis has tired me out, and today I only have enough energy to pass on this stupid joke. Thanks for the inspiration.

A man walks into the bar with a loud Hawai’ian shirt and an alligator on a leash.

The bartender takes one look at him and says, “Look, pal, we don’t serve banjo players here.”

“Do you serve ukulele players?” says the man.

“Sure,” says the bartender.

“Good,” says the man, “then how about a beer for me, and a fried ukulele player for my alligator here.”

Cranky for a reason

And you wonder why Mr. Crankypants is cranky? Because he’s 48, that’s why. A University of Warwick professor has done research showing that simply being middle-aged is depressing:

Using data on 2 million people, from 80 nations, researchers from the University of Warwick and Dartmouth College in the US have found an extraordinarily consistent international pattern in depression and happiness levels that leaves us most miserable in middle age…. The researchers found happiness levels followed a U shaped curve, with happiness higher towards the start and end of our lives and leaving us most miserable in middle age….

For the average person in the modern world, the dip in mental health and happiness comes on slowly, not suddenly in a single year. Only in their 50s do most people emerge from the low period. But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20 year old. Link to press release.

This news bit comes via Will Shetterly, whose commenters point out that for some of us middle-aged folk, age 20 sucked too. For his part, Mr. C. wonders if the average 20 year old just doesn’t have enough experience to realize how depressing the world is — never questioning why it is we are all in this handbasket, nor asking where it is we are all going.

A little more nuance with that, please

The January, 2008, issue of Locus celebrates the 90th birthday of Arthur C. Clarke with a number of special features, including a December interview borrowed from BBC’s Focus magazine. The interviewer asks, “What is the greatest threat that we, as a race, are facing?” and Sir Arthur replies:

Organised religion polluting our minds as it pretends to deliver morality and spiritual salvation. It’s spreading the most malevolent mind virus of all. I hope our race can one day outgrow this primitive notion, as I envisaged in 3001: The Final Odyssey.

I think Clarke underestimates the threat of global climate change, nuclear weapons, and continuing population growth, but as he admits elsewhere in the interview, “I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy, if only because it offers us the opportunity of self-fulfilling prophesy.” There are a few other threats I’d throw in there before I got to religion — global poverty and associated malnutrition, the growing crisis around clean water supplies, violence against women, etc., etc. — threats that can physically kill you long before religion’s “mind virus” infects you.

Having said that, organized religion that “pretends to deliver morality and spiritual salvation” is indeed a dangerous thing; George W. Bush’s religion, which appears to have driven him to an ill-considered war in Iraq, is a case in point. Like Clarke, I am wary of religion that claims to deliver morality;– although I’m quite comfortable with a religion that allows consideration of moral issues in a skeptical but supportive community because it seems to me that moral issues are impossible to resolve on one’s own, and today’s market-driven society here in the United States allows precious few places where groups of people can talk through moral issues openly. Like Clarke, I am also wary of any religion that pretends to deliver spiritual salvation;– although I’m comfortable with a religion that simply states that all persons are automatically saved as a way of making the point that all persons are worthy of dignity and respect; but aside from that, I have no interest in a religion that claims to provide salvation only to a chosen few. (And yeah, I admit my bias, I like to think that my religion is one with which I can be comfortable.)

So I think Clarke makes one or both of the usual two errors that people make damning judgement of religion. The first error lies in damning all religion based on a small set of direct experiences with organized religion; and the second error lies in damning all religion based on portrayals of religion in the media. The first error uses too small a sample for adequate statistical analysis, and ignores exceptions that really must be considered before making such broad pronouncements. The second error is the classic error of relying on second-hand sources of questionable accuracy; if adequate first-hand observation isn’t possible, it’s always better to rely on serious peer-reviewed scholarly works, to get better data and a more nuanced analysis of that data.

Socialist sermons

Since 1992, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Standford University has slowly been issuing The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., a multi-volume series of King’s writings; new volumes come out as they get the funding for research, editing, and publication. The most recent volume, published in January, 2007, collects King’s sermons. In an article titled “The Prophet Reconsidered: 40 years after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., new studies emphasize his economic and social philosophy,” Christopher Phelps reports that King’s sermons are far more leftist than you might think:

The most recent volume [Vol. VI of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.] comprises King’s sermons from 1948 to 1963, which remind us of King’s immersion in the black Baptist church and of the wide range of theological sources and social criticism he drew upon. For King, Christianity was the social gospel. His outlook was astonishingly radical, especially for the McCarthy era. In a college paper entitled “Will Capitalism Survive?” King held that “capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world.” He concluded a 1953 sermon by asking his congregation to decide “whom ye shall serve, the god of money or the eternal God of the universe.” He opposed communism as materialistic, but argued that only an end to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, an egalitarian program of social equality, fellowship, and love, could serve as its alternative. In a 1952 letter responding to Coretta’s gift to him of a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward (“There is still hope for the future … ,” she inscribed on its flyleaf), King wrote, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry.”

This is a very different MLK than we get in the popular media these days! More about the book, including how to purchase for approx. US$40. Thanks to Fred for sending me the January 18, 2008, article on King.

TV zombies

Last night, Carol and I decided to watch an episode of “The Mighty Boosh,” the British cult TV show, as a way to relax before we went to bed. We put the laptop computer on a chair and settled back on the couch to watch. But although we have access to the most recent episodes, from the third season just now being released in Britain, we decided not to watch them. As happens to too many television series, the characters have now shrunk into crude caricatures of what they originally were.

Carol pointed out that this happened with “Sex and the City”: in the first season, she said you could almost believe that these were real women talking to one another, but as the show progressed they looked more and more like caricatures. We agreed that the same thing happened with “Will and Grace”: in the first couple of seasons, the four lead actors did some wonderful, fresh, spontaneous ensemble acting; but as time went on, the acting got stale, and by the last few seasons the show had become hard to watch. As for “The Mighty Boosh,” by the third season, you can no longer believe that the two lead characters would ever be friends or even spend any time together, and so the whole premise of the show becomes unbelievable. In each case, the characters became what I think of as “TV zombies”: they move around and talk to one another and almost look alive, but inside they are dead and rotting away. John Cleese did the right thing when he pulled the plug on “Fawlty Towers” after only twelve episodes; it would have been almost impossible to keep the characters and their interactions alive and fresh, and what a zombie horror that show could have become had it continued.

So Carol and I watched an episode from the first season of “The Mighty Boosh.” No stink of death then; the old shows remain delightfully free from TV zombies.

There are parallels to preachers here — preachers need to keep reinventing themselves on a regular basis to keep from turning into preaching zombies — but that’s kind of close to home for me, and, not wanting to be tarred with my own brush, I really don’t want to go there right now.

The true nature of happiness

Having based sermons on readings from the Beatles and from Monty Python, I consider myself open to the insights of the sacred texts of British popular culture. But for the past couple of years, I have not found myself inspired by the Brits.

Until Carol discovered The Mighty Boosh. And lo, unto us has The Mighty Boosh spoken words power and righteousness on the nature of happiness. I’m not sure when exactly I’ll use this reading in a worship service, but it will be sometime in the next year….

Scene: the Zoo.

(Howard Moon and Vince Noir, in green zookeeper’s uniforms, carry a bucket of animal feed to some small cages. Vince wears a poncho over his uniform.)

Vince: C’mon, Howard, put some energy into it. Get involved.

Howard: I’m carryin a bucket of seed. How am I supposed to get involved in that?

Vince: This is the best job in the zoo — millet distribution!

(Vince opens door of small cage, chucks a scoop of seed in. Sound of small animal squeaking in delight.)

Howard: Somethin wrong with you, you know, don’t you.

Vince: What d’you mean?

Howard: You’re always happy aren’t you? Everythin’s fun for you.

(Vince sighs.)

Howard: You see a peanut — the day’s off to a good start. You witness some soil — it’s a jamboree for Vince Noir. I need something more.

Vince: I think it’s this poncho.

(He swirls around so poncho flares out.)

Vince: I mean, it’s impossible to be unhappy in a poncho!

And there it is, the answer to one of humanity’s age-old questions: how to find true happiness.

Continue reading →

Good play

Roger Clemens told Mike Wallace that he “never” took steroids. “Swear,” said Roger.

Roger Clemens had an hour-long phone call with his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee. This was not long after McNamee had said publicly that he had given Clemens steriods. A lawyer for McNamee has raised the possibility that Clemens was engaged in “attempted influencing” not long before both men are supposed to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Roger Clemens very much wants to get into baseball’s Hall of Fame.

This would make a good play, written by Sophocles, at the end of which Clemens’s hubris destroys him.